Drowned Lives

15

The meaning behind Samuel’s letter sent an extra stab of guilt through my heart. While I’d been feeling misguidedly complacent about being alone and without a family, there had been this relative, who’d felt equally alone and unwanted, but with the added burden of old age. He’d lived alone, visited only occasionally by a daughter who was now gone to some distant part of the world. And he’d become obsessed with the past.

It was clearly an unhealthy obsession, for it had surely turned his mind. This was obvious to me from the tone of his words. Genetic memory? Proust and his madeleine? This wasn’t just going off at a tangent, or the vague wanderings that old people were prone to. Samuel Longden had definitely been a bit cracked. He’d needed help, but not the sort of help I could ever have given him.

But what of me now? I’d spent the last few months adjusting to the idea that I no longer had any family. Now here was this old man who’d walked into my life and turned it upside down, and it was difficult to know how to react. I felt astonished and angry at myself that I’d been so brainwashed by my parents and believed there were no other living Buckleys. In retrospect, their insistence sounded false, a case of protesting too much.

But I’d been perfectly happy to accept the situation. Even relieved, if I was honest. I’d never enjoyed the duty visits to my mother’s side of the family, or the obligatory get-togethers at Christmas, and I’d been glad there were none to be suffered on the Buckley side. It had seemed like an escape.

If only, just once, I’d heard my Great-Uncle Samuel’s name mentioned, I might have started asking the right questions a bit earlier, when my parents were still alive to answer for themselves.

That night, and during the next day, I searched my memory for references to the missing side of my family. But it seemed a complete blank. As a child, I certainly couldn’t recall having questioned the lack of Buckleys — being surfeited, I suppose, with the Claytons and Bridgemans, and all those suburban houses in Perry Barr and Erdington. I recalled plump cousins and middle-aged aunts smelling of face powder, all of whom I was obliged to kiss on family occasions like weddings and funerals.

But there had never been a get-together of the Buckleys, no visits to unfamiliar houses in suburbs of Lichfield or villages like Whittington, no beery uncles to shake hands with in return for a fifty pence piece. There had been no names and addresses of Buckleys on our Christmas card list. Or Longdens for that matter.

And yet here was evidence that they’d existed. At least two of them, Samuel and his daughter Caroline. No, make that three — Samuel’s wife, my Great-Aunt Alison, had been alive until ten years ago. Did my parents not go to Samuel’s wedding? Had they ever spoken to Alison? No matter what disagreement had alienated the brothers, Alison could surely have done nothing wrong. And had they really not attended her funeral, after the articulated lorry had severed her relationship to the Buckley family? But I knew the answer, and the thought made me unreasonably angry.

I’d always thought of myself as a man who looked only to the future, and never really wondered about my past. There are more important things than family, more urgent issues than relatives with whom you have nothing in common.

Now, I had a lot to think about. When I’d left the house that morning, it had been as somebody with no ties, a solitary offshoot of the wilting Buckley family tree. But it seemed I had to come to terms with a creeping hedge of relatives that had been lurking around me unseen, who were now getting closer.

Most of all, it was incredible that my Great-Uncle Samuel had exploded into my life and left it again in the course of a single week, like a wayward comet streaking across my universe. What, really, had been his intentions?

Once back in the house, I made my way up to the landing and lowered the folding ladder that my father had installed to give access to the attic. There was a big space up there, which could have been converted into an extra bedroom easily if I’d ever had any brothers or sisters. But there’d never been any use for it, except as storage for all the useless lumber that accumulates in a house over the years.

Since the death of my parents, I’d made no attempt to clear out the rubbish. In fact, I hadn’t even bothered removing their clothes from the wardrobe in their bedroom. Some items could have gone to the charity shops, I suppose, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. Who wanted a few old suits and cardigans, or dresses impregnated with the familiar, sweet odour of my mother’s perfume?

When I’d last been in their room, my mother’s make-up and perfume bottles had still been standing on the dressing table in front of the mirror. My father hadn’t moved them, and neither had I. Now they stood next to his hairbrush and his favourite cufflinks.

In the attic, though, was an old suitcase, which I could recall being brought out occasionally when I was a child. It contained two bundles of photographs. Some were of myself as a boy in the late 1960s and early 70s, all scuffed jeans and sulky stares as the Flower Power era passed me by. Some showed my parents on their wedding day, and later on holiday in Scotland or Majorca.

But there were other photographs too, which had never meant much to me — black and white prints of unfamiliar faces, figures posing stiffly outside the church where my parents had married, or staring with frozen expressions at the camera with their baggy suits and Brylcreemed hair. Most of the people had been nameless, and an explanation for their presence had never been offered. But that suitcase seemed to be the only place I could start looking for answers.

As soon as I opened the lid, a strange essence was released into the air — not quite a smell or a taste, but almost a movement. I knew I was becoming too fanciful. It was Samuel’s talk of madeleines that had done it. Of course, an old suitcase full of mementos was bound to contain its own smell of age and history. It was a cloud of almost imperceptible dust particles that had risen from the contents to float in the light creeping through the dormer window. But recognising the simple reality didn’t stop me feeling as though I’d just opened Pandora’s box to let out a swarm of tiny demons.

‘Hello! Hello-o-o!’

I jerked at the sound, scattering a handful of photographs in the dust as I returned to an awareness of my surroundings. I became conscious of the pain in my calves where I was developing cramp from squatting in front of the suitcase. I must already have been crouching there for several minutes, lost in a world that had been dead for many years.

‘Hello!’

I knew straightaway that it was Rachel. No one else had quite that quality of instinctive heartiness to their voice. And who else would have the cheek to walk into my house uninvited, as if we were intimate friends?

I edged towards the trap door, wincing at the discomfort in my legs, and looked down onto the landing. Rachel’s face was turned up towards me, round and white, an expression of concern and puzzlement in her eyes. She had a furry black bundle clutched in her arms.

‘Chris? Are you all right? What are you doing up there?’

‘Just looking for something.’

‘I couldn’t get an answer at the back door, so I came in to see if everything was okay. Boswell was crying at the door.’

‘Yes, he does that. He just wants a bit of attention, that’s all.’

Before I could think of anything else to say, another twinge of pain went through my leg as the circulation began to return. Rachel noticed my expression immediately.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

But the damn woman was already putting the cat down and starting to climb the ladder towards the attic.

‘Gosh, what a lot of stuff,’ she said, as her head appeared above the dusty boards. I tried to edge casually round so that the suitcase was hidden behind me, but it didn’t work. Her antennae were working overtime.

‘What’s in there? Oh, old photos. I love old photos.’

And then it was too late. She would accept nothing less than that we should drag the suitcase down the ladder and set it out on the dining room table while we went through every one. I even left her to it for a while so I could feed Boswell and put the kettle on for a cup of tea.

While I was in the kitchen, I cursed myself for not locking the back door. Rachel had been a regular visitor to the house while my mother was alive, and later on had called on my father occasionally. Since I’d been on my own, she’d used every pretext to get back into the house. She knew every detail of my life.

‘Doesn’t your mother look lovely in her wedding dress,’ she said.

‘Does she?’

She was gazing with a fond wistfulness at my parents’ wedding photos. I thought my father looked ridiculous in his tight trousers, narrow tie and pointy-toed shoes, with his quiff sticking up from his forehead like an early Cliff Richard. It was 1963, there was still a Conservative government and the Beatles hadn’t yet had time to make an impact on fashions. If it had been a few years later, my father would have been sporting wide lapels, a fringe and a droopy moustache. I came along in 1965, when Harold Wilson was prime minister, American planes were starting to bomb Vietnam, and Rhodesia was declaring UDI.

In the photograph of the group outside St Chad’s church, my mother had a long, straight bob — but, apart from that, she could have been a bride from any era in that traditional white lace gown. As to whether she looked lovely, I was the wrong person to judge. She was just my mother.

‘There’s snow on the ground,’ said Rachel. ‘They must have got married in winter.’

‘February.’

‘Was that a bad winter?’

‘I wasn’t actually there, you know. I wasn’t even born. That was the way things were done in those days. Wedding first, babies later.’

She looked at me sideways. ‘Yes, but it’s the sort of detail you get to know, isn’t it?’

‘Not me.’

Yes, it had been a bad winter in 1962–63. The Minster Pool had frozen over and snow had turned Beacon Park into a vast Arctic waste, stranding the statue of Captain Smith of the Titanic in a snowfield that was normally the Museum Gardens. Birds had frozen to death in the trees, and villages had been cut off for days. My father once said it had reminded everyone of the winter of 1947, when Lichfield had relied on two horse-drawn snow ploughs to clear the streets.

But these weren’t only things I knew. They were family memories. They came with the remembered sound of my father’s voice. They were brought back by the sight and feel of the photographs, by the evocative but unidentifiable smell released from the musty depths of the suitcase.

‘And this must be you as a little boy.’

Rachel was thumbing through the photographs again, turning over pictures of me standing in the back garden at Stowe Pool Lane, wearing knee-length shorts and a short back and sides. Then there was me on a bike in my school uniform, with a satchel on my back. And there was another me, the older teenager in jeans and a Wolverhampton Wanderers shirt, growing sideboards and trying to look like my Wolves hero, Derek Dougan.

The photos were starting to make me feel uncomfortable. To me, the past was an unpleasant necessity, not something to rake over and dissect with that awful mixture of mockery and fascination. It was if I’d spread my dirty underwear on the table for her to paw through.

Now she was laughing. ‘I bet you were a real pain in the neck when you were that age.’

I said nothing while I drank my tea. She looked up at me, and mimed an exaggeratedly apologetic expression. ‘I’m sorry, Chris — you were looking for something, weren’t you? And I’m interfering as usual. Just tell me if I’m being a pain in the neck, and I’ll go.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No, no. Come on, what was it you were looking for? A nice picture of your mum and dad, perhaps. Was that what you wanted? Something to frame on the sideboard?’

What I really wanted was to grab the big wedding day groups and scan the massed ranks of relatives for a face that resembled the old man I’d met one morning at Fosseway. And I wanted to pull open the folded, yellowing envelope that Rachel hadn’t noticed yet. I knew it contained a few older photographs, the tiny, square sepia-coloured ones that were the only surviving images of my grandparents on my father’s side.

My Grandfather Buckley had died when my father was a boy — that much I knew. I couldn’t even picture his face, and I desperately needed to search it for resemblances to the man who claimed to have been his brother, my Great-Uncle Samuel. There might even be evidence of the existence of Samuel himself. Could there possibly be a snap of George and Samuel together? There were photos in that envelope of people who’d never been identified to me, grim-faced men and women in old-fashioned, ill-fitting clothes who stared at the camera as if the lens might steal their souls.

Rachel must have been psychic, or perhaps she’d seen my eyes stray automatically towards the envelope.

‘Ah, what’s this?’

The next second, there they were, spilled in a casual muddle on the table. Faded images of unfamiliar faces. A spasm of pain took me unawares and made me catch my breath as I looked down at a picture of my father, aged about seven, uncomfortably turned out in his Sunday best for a parade of some kind. His hair was cropped at the sides, with a longer lock flopping onto his forehead. He looked scrubbed and starched and vaguely resentful in his baggy shorts, and his bare legs were scrawny and pitiful. One of his socks had started to slip and crumple on his shin. Trembling with an inexplicable emotion, I picked up the photograph and turned it over. On the back, in washed-out black ink, it said: ‘Arthur. Visit by Queen Elizabeth, 1946’.

The next snap showed my father again a few years later, a gawky boy in a white open-necked shirt, sitting with a group of adults. All the men were in ties and braces, the women in flowered dresses, enjoying the sunshine on an outing somewhere. ‘Whitsun 1949’ said the scrawl. There was a solitary portrait of my grandfather, George Buckley, from about the same period. He was standing proudly outside his back door in polished boots and a dark suit, solemn and upright, a pipe clenched in his teeth and not a hint of a smile. There was undoubtedly a look about his eyes and nose that reminded me of the old man who’d claimed to be his brother.

But I knew how easy it was to convince yourself of these resemblances. How often had I heard people cooing over a month-old baby, finding its father’s eyes, its mother’s hair. Once, I’d been horribly embarrassed after remarking to a couple I was interviewing that their son looked just like his father — only to be told that the child was adopted.

‘This George,’ said Rachel, reading the back of the photo. ‘He was a fine-looking man.’

‘My grandfather.’

‘Mmm.’

I knew she could sense my tension. She was far too sharp to miss the change in my mood.

‘Did you ever know him?’

‘No, he died a long time ago.’

‘And why is he on his own?’ she said. ‘Where’s your grandmother, I wonder?’

‘I don’t know.’

She was right. It did look a bit odd. It was the kind of photograph you’d expect to include a couple, a posed portrait of Grandma and Granddad for the family album. But there was no sign of Grandma. No portrait of Mary Buckley. I looked at the group photo, but there was no way to identify her among the other women.

‘Have you any other living relatives on that side of the family?’ asked Rachel.

I was waiting anxiously for her to turn up the next photograph. But when I didn’t answer her question, she looked at me keenly, as if she could see right through me.

‘Well, have you?’ she said.

And then it all came out. Rachel was fascinated, and grew excited as she listened. Her response made me feel better. Being able to tell somebody about it, talking it through out loud, made the situation clearer in my mind. And once I’d told Rachel, there no longer seemed to be any doubt in my heart that the old man I’d met really was my Great-Uncle Samuel. It seemed right for the first time.

‘But that’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘A long-lost relative. It’s like a fairy story. But how sad that he died.’

‘Sad, yes.’

‘I’d have loved to have met him. Properly, I mean. I didn’t know who he was when he came that day.’

She put the photograph of my Grandfather Buckley aside, and I could see the next picture in the pile. It was almost the last one, and it showed two boys with similar serious expressions. One of them looked about twelve or thirteen, the other a few years younger. They were leaning against a heavy wooden beam, like the balance beam of a canal lock gate. They both wore stout boots and flannel trousers, their hands thrust deep into their pockets, and the older one had a flat cap at a jaunty angle. The caption read: George and Samuel, June 1925.

‘I researched my family tree a few years ago,’ said Rachel. ‘It was fascinating. There’s an amazing amount of information you can find, but you need to know where to look, or it can take forever. I joined the local family history society for a while. If you’re thinking of researching your tree, Chris, I wouldn’t mind helping — if you want.’

I remembered that Rachel had been a librarian. She’d gone back to her career after the divorce, but her part-time job at a branch library had disappeared in the cutbacks. At one time, as an Information Officer, I’d been responsible for justifying those cuts to the public. Now we were in the same boat. The knife that had made those cuts had turned on me.

But there was no way I could agree to what she was suggesting. The thought of my next-door neighbour burrowing through my family’s past repulsed me. I started to regret having told her anything. I wished I’d found the strength of will to keep my mouth shut and ask her to leave before it went so far. Suddenly, the whole exercise seemed pointless and self-obsessed, and it was Rachel’s fault for dragging me into it.

‘No, I won’t be doing anything like that, thanks,’ I said. ‘Look, the reason I’m going through this material — it’s not because of an interest in my family history, or out of loyalty to Samuel Longden. It’s not even because I feel guilty.’

‘I never said it was.’

‘The only reason I’m going to do anything at all is because I’m being paid for it. You see? I have to earn a living, and if that means raking through the lives of the long dead, then so be it.’

I began to gather the photographs together and stuff them back into their envelopes. I plucked the picture of George and Samuel from her fingers and tossed it in with the rest as if it was of no importance. Rachel looked a bit hurt.

‘Now,’ I said, ‘I’ve got other things to do. If you don’t mind...’

She got up, flushing slightly. ‘That’s okay. I’ve got to go out myself. I’ll be calling at Tesco’s, if you want anything fetching.’

‘No thanks. I’m doing my own shopping later. I usually go to Safeway.’

‘Fine. Fine.’

I got her as far as the front door before she tried again. There was a hint of desperation in her voice, a pleading note that made me grit my teeth. ‘You won’t be wanting me to help, then?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Then I cursed myself for not being definite. ‘No, I’m sure I won’t. Thanks all the same.’

Her shoulders sagged. ‘Well, you know where to find me, if you change your mind. I’m not exactly a million miles away.’

Finally, I got her out of the door and down the path with a few perfunctory words of farewell. I bundled the packets of photos together and shoved them into a drawer of the mahogany sideboard, stuffed well in among the place mats and spare fuses and God knows what else my parents had collected. One day I would really have to clear it all out. Perhaps I should look at the small ads in the Echo to find somebody who did house clearances. Let strangers shift the lot and do whatever they wanted with it. I could make a fresh start, clear the house of memories.

Boswell wandered into the room, right on cue. I thought of him as my parents’ cat, but in reality my father had never been able to stand him. Boswell had been restricted to the back garden and the kitchen, except when my mother let him sneak onto her chair while Dad was out. Now, the cat had full run of the house.

For the past three months, I’d known there was something deep and painful that my father had left in me, a splinter of memory festering under the skin, lodged in a place I couldn’t easily reach. It was the cause of the constant dull ache in my heart that sometimes flared into those jagged twinges of agony that hit me when I saw the photographs of him as a boy. It was a pain that I couldn’t cure until I’d erased him completely from my life.